Inner Eurasia refers to a huge area that inciudes aii the iands within the former Soviet Union, as weii as Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. To group this large and disparate region together makes sense oniy on the hypothesis that Inner Eurasia has an underiying geo-graphicai coherence that has shaped the history of the entire region. Early in the twentieth century, the British geographer Halford Mackinder argued that it is helpful to think of the Eurasian iandmass as divided into two main regions. At its heart is a huge, largely flat, plain— the largest continuous region of flatlands on earth. Inner Eurasia was constructed mainiy from two ancient tectonic piates (the Siberian piates) that joined some 300 miiiion years ago to create a huge mountain chain that has since worn away to ieave the iow Urai Mountains. Attached to the west, south, and east of the Inner Eurasian piain iie severai subcontinentai peninsuias, aii with a more varied topography. These make up what we can caii Outer Eurasia. Outer Eurasia inciudes Europe and Southwest Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China. The piates carrying modern Europe and China joined the Siberian piates approximateiy 200 mii-lion years ago. Within the last 60 million years, the plates carrying modern India and Africa drove north and coi-iided with the Eurasian piate, creating a chain of mountains from the Aips to the Himaiayas. These offer the ciearest topographicai border between Inner and Outer Eurasia. So, at the most general level, Eurasia consists of an ancient, interior piain that is surrounded by regions cioser to the sea that have a choppier and more compiex topography.
On large scales, Inner and Outer Eurasia are very different. Not only is Inner Eurasia mostly flatter than Outer Eurasia, it is also more arid, for it is cut off ftom the sea, except to the north where extreme cold limits evaporation and precipitation. In Inner Eurasia, average yearly rainfall exceeds 50 centimeters only in the far west (in modern Belarus, northern Ukraine, and European Russia), along the southern parts of the eastern Siberian coast, and in pockets in Siberia, while in Outer Eurasia, regions with rainfall of less than 50 centimeters a year are unusual, and in many regions average rainfall is well above 100 centimeteis a year. Because it lies fuither noith. Inner Eurasia is also, on average, colder than Outer Eurasia. As. Mackinder (1962,110) pointed out, the heartland of Eurasia is, roughly speaking, the part that freezes in latiuiuy; ‘‘At mid-winter, as seen from the moon, avast white shield would reveal the Heartland in its largest meaning.” Because Inner Eurasia is so flat and most of it is far from the moderating influence of oceans, its temperatures also tend to be more extreme than those of Outer Eurasia. Differences between summer and winter increase as one moves east, so that, in general, the climates of Mongolia are harsher and more vtu itible than those of Ukraine.
Matness, aridity, northerly latitudes, and continental climates shaped all the societies of Inner Eurasia and ensured that the histoiy of Inner Eurasia would be very different from that of Outer Eurasia. Matness e. xplains why the states that emerged in this region were some of the largest in the world, for there were few geographical barriers to the movements of powerful armies. Tlie harsh climatic and ecological environments of Inner Eurasia help explain why population densities were lower than in most of Outer Eurasia. This was true even in the foraging (Paleolithic) era, for humans evolved in the savanna lands of. Africa, and had to develop entirely new forms of clothing and housing, as well as new hunting techniques, to settle in Inner Eurasia. Not surprisingly. Inner Eurasia seems to have been settled later than most of Outer Eurasia. In the Neolithic era. the region’s aridity ensured that agriculture made little headway for many thousands of years, except in parts of modern Ukraine and in the borderlands of Central Asia, where irrigation farming was possible. Extensive fanning communities appeared in the so-called Tiipolye culture of Ukraine, and in Central. Asia, significant urban communities emerged during the third millennium ncn. Elsewhere, the Neolithic revolution in its most familiar fonn. that of
Grain-based agriculture, bypassed most of Inner Eurasia. So, while agriculture spread in much of Outer Eurasia, laying the foundations for several great agrarian civilizations, in Inner Eurasia agriculture made hardly any headway for many thousands of years. Instead, Neolithic technologies entered Inner Eurasia in the less familiar form of pastoralism.
Unlike agricultural lifeways, which are dominated by domesticated plants, pastoral lifeways are dominated by the exploitation of domesticated livestock. Pastoralism became a viable lifeway as a result of a series of innovations that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt has described as the secondary-products revolution. Beginning around
4000 BCE, people began to exploit not just those products of livestock that could be used after an animal’s slaughter (its skin, bones, and meat), but also the animal’s secondary products—products such as its wool, blood, milk, and traction power—that could be used while it was still alive. These techniques raised the efficiency with which domesticated animals could be exploited, making it possible to build entire lifeways around the use of domesticated animals such as sheep, cattle, goats, horses, camels, and yaks. Pastoralism proved an effective way of exploiting the vast grasslands that stretched from Hungary to Manchuria, and, for several thousand years, it was the dominant lifeway throughout this region. The earliest evidence of pastoralism comes from the Sredny Stog cultures of eastern Ukraine, which
The peoples of Inner Eurasia used a variety of animals for transport. This photo from the early twentieth century shows camels loaded with thorns for fodder.
Include some of the first evidence for the riding of horses. These were still relatively sedentary cultures. However, in the third millennium bce, pastoralism of some form spread throughout much of southern Russia and Ukraine and into parts of modern Kazakhstan. Evidence from steppe burial mounds suggests that pastoral-ism was also becoming more nomadic, and this makes ecological sense, for the most economical way to graze large numbers of animals is to move them over large areas. By 2000 bce, pastoralism of some form had spread towards the western borders of Mongolia. Nicola Di Cosmo, a specialist on Inner Asia, writes, “A conservative interpretation would date a significant impact of horseback riding on western and central Asia to between the mid-third and early second millennium bce” (2001, 26). In the first millennium BCE, pastoralism finally spread to Mongolia. It also appeared in new and more warlike forms that may have depended on technological innovations such as the appearance of new and improved saddles and improved compound bows.
The dominant role of pastoralism in the steppes of Inner Eurasia had a profound impact on the history of the entire region, and also on the way that the region’s history has been perceived. Pastoralism cannot support the large populations that agriculture can, and pastoral-ists are normally nomadic or seminomadic, so pastoral-ism did not generate the areas of dense settlement characteristic of so much of Outer Eurasia. For the most part, this was a world without towns or cities. Instead of villages and cities, small, nomadic encampments dominated the steppes. Because cities and all the paraphernalia we associate with cities and agrarian civilizations existed only in a few borderland regions of Inner Eurasia, the history of the region was strikingly different from that of Outer Eurasia. For the historian, one of the most important differences is that pastoralist societies generated few written records. Because historians rely heavily on such records, they have tended to ignore societies that do not produce them. Inner Eurasia has too often been seen through the eyes of the agrarian civilizations of Outer Eurasia, beginning with the works of the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-425 bce) and the Chinese Han dynasty historian Sima Qian (c. 145-86 bce). Even the most sympathetic Outer Eurasian historians portrayed Inner Eurasia as a sort of black hole out of which pas-toralists rode to rape and pillage the villages and cities of the “civilized” world. Not surprisingly, Inner Eurasian pastoralists have traditionally been cast as “barbarians” in world historiography
In part, this is because the mobility of pastoralism, the skills it teaches in the handling of large animals, and the ubiquity of raiding ensured that most pastoralist societies of Inner Eurasia have had a military influence out of proportion to their sheer numbers. In a famous passage, Sima Qian wrote of the pastoralist Xiongnu to China’s north,
The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep and shoot birds and rats with a bow and arrow, and when they get a little older they shoot foxes and hares, which are used for food. Thus all the young men are able to use a bow and act as armed cavalry in time of war. It is their custom to herd their flocks in times of peace and make their living by hunting, but in periods of crisis they take up arms and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions. (Watson 1961, 2:155)
The limited resources of pastoralist societies also ensured that they were usually keen to engage in exchanges with neighboring communities of farmers, trading livestock produce such as meat, skins, and cloths for agricultural products and artisan goods including weaponry. Evidence of such exchanges, some peaceful, but some clearly violent, appears as early as the fourth millennium bce on the edges of the Tripolye culture in Ukraine, in the objects found within steppe burial mounds and in the increasing use of fortifications by farming communities.
World History
